It is probably the biggest educational injustice the pandemic has dealt out. And that, obviously, is saying something.

It’s not just that students in their exam years have lost huge chunks of vital education at a crucial point in their school careers. It’s that, through no fault of their own, some within the same cohorts have been hit much harder than others and that that will translate into lower exam grades that could blight the rest of their lives.

Everyone is definitely not in the same boat when it comes to learning loss. It all depends on how badly your particular area or school was hit by Covid.

Students in Cornwall for example, where infection rates were among the lowest, are likely to have spent much more time in school than those in, say, Kent or Leicestershire, where many more bubbles will have sent home to isolate as the virus spread in the autumn term.  

In full: GCSE and A level 2021 Ofqual and DfE proposals

GCSEs 2021: 4 reasons why more unfairness is inevitable

Heads: DfE criticised for ‘deafening silence’ on closing Covid exam learning gap

Students’ fate will also depend on how good the remote education offered by their school was and how quickly it got to grips with it. Crucially the unfairness of learning loss will be magnified by the lack of space, resources, parental support and peace available at home for some students once schools were closed to them. You might have had to share your laptop with younger siblings and your parents, for example, if you had a laptop at all.

Some of these inequalities of course exist in any school year. But the pandemic has deepened them, making the mountain the most disadvantaged have to climb to succeed with good exam grades much, much steeper.

The Department for Education knew this. That’s why on December 3 education secretary, Gavin Williamson, announced “a new expert group to look at differential learning”, to “Monitor the variation in the impact of the pandemic on students across the country”.

DfE recognised differential learning loss problem

But while the DfE clearly recognised the problem the truth may also be that it had no idea what to do about it.

That’s presumably why an “expert group” was proposed rather than any actual solutions - because they didn’t really have any.

Other measures were announced that day to help counter disruption from the pandemic felt by exam year students. Generous grading, advance notice of some topics, extra exam aids and second chances to sit exams, were all part of Mr Williamson’s package of support for exam year students.

But they were all across-the-board measures to benefit every student, that would do nothing to counter the hugely differing levels of disruption between students within this year’s cohorts. And on that central intractable problem there was nothing beyond the pledge of the expert group.

It looked suspiciously like an exercise in kicking the can down the road, hoping that something would turn up. But if that looked like this year’s hardest hit students were being let down then, there was much worse to come.

It wasn’t that anybody necessarily expected much from this group. After all, there were and are no, clear easy solutions. And often such hastily assembled working parties are more about being seen to be taking a problem seriously, rather than actually getting to grips with it. But people did still take the DfE at its word. They did still expect the group to come up with something. They did at least expect the group to exist.

‘Deafening silence’ on learning loss expert group

Then we heard… absolutely nothing. A full month after Mr Williamson announced the expert group, heads were moved to criticise the “deafening silence” that followed and the lack of any apparent progress in even setting up a group that was supposed to be coming up with a plan on differential learning loss by the Spring.

But for students at the wrong end of this, those getting increasingly panicked by all the lessons they had missed as exams loomed, those who really needed that plan, there was a real sense of urgency.

At the turn of the year Catherine Cole, principal of the Sixth Form College Farnborough, told the BBC’s World at One that uncertainty over the expert group was leaving A-level students in severe distress.

“The A-level students are very anxious because in December they were told there would be some review of the exams for summer 2021, and then we were told nothing,” she said.

“We had a meeting with an exam board to discuss it - still not heard anything; we were told a panel of experts would be set up by the government to work out what they were going to do with the exams - nothing.

“I don’t know who the panel of experts is but for students, they hear these things and they’re expecting an announcement and it’s not coming, and the mental health of our second-year students… we’ve had more students presenting with suicidal thoughts than ever before, because they’re just extremely anxious.”

More than a month for DfE to answer a question

But that anxiety didn’t seem to be reaching Sanctuary Buildings. Or if it was the DfE wasn’t acting on it. It wasn’t that there was a lack of urgency, it wasn’t even that progress was glacial, it was that there appeared to be no progress at all.

By this time, Labour’s shadow schools minister Wes Streeting had, on 17 December, used a Parliamentary question to ask for the expert group’s terms of reference and membership. But it took schools minister Nick Gibb well over a month to provide an answer.

Then finally - on 29 January - it came, as Mr Gibb announced that the DfE was “refocusing this group and is working to finalise the terms of reference and membership”.

This refocusing came “in light of the decision to cancel exams”, the minister’s answer explained.

But exams had been cancelled on 4 January. It had had nearly three working weeks since then to finalise the terms of reference. Fear not, Mr Gibb’s answer seemed to say, as it concluded, saying with a straight face: “Further details on membership and priorities of the group will be provided in due course.”

Exam cancellation doesn’t solve learning loss problem

It’s worth pausing here to pre-empt any possible suggestion that the cancellation of this year’s exams would mean the end of the differential learning loss problem for this year’s candidates.

The problem - to spell it out again - isn’t just that some students have missed bigger chunks of their exam courses than others, missed more topics than others. It is that some students will have been in schools not as well set up for remote education as others. And some students will suffered Covid disruption that goes beyond just what they are taught, and bleeds into how much uninterrupted time, space and resources they had at home or at school to learn and absorb it.

All these losses are of course damaging enough in purely educational terms. But they can have a lasting impact on lives when come up against exams that take no account of regional or local learning loss and leave students who have suffered it with lower grades.

But wouldn’t the cancellation of exams, to be replaced by teacher assessed GCSE and A-level grades mean the end of this unfairness? Wouldn’t teachers be able to take their students’ learning loss into account? The short answer, under the proposals set out by the DfE and Ofqual last month, is no, not all of it.

GCSE grades won’t take learning loss into account

“We do not believe that teachers should be asked to decide the grade a student might have achieved had the pandemic not occurred,” the proposals say.

“We propose grades this year should be based on teachers’ assessments of the evidence of the standard at which their students are performing… The exam boards that will issue the results needed to be confident the grades are justifiable.”

In other words teachers should not take into account their students’ learning loss when they grade them, they should just look at where they are in reality.

And teachers are supposed to base those grades on papers set by exam boards (or something teachers can show is equivalent) with accompanying exam board mark schemes. So exams by any normal definition of the word, graded to national standards that take no account of regional learning loss.

Yes, the proposals do “allow teachers options to take account of content that has not been fully taught due to the disruption” when deciding what topics students are tested on.

But differential learning loss can’t just be accounted for by not testing certain missing bits of the curriculum. Injustices will also be caused by differing standards of remote education and the simple fact that due to Covid some students will have had many fewer hours in lessons than others.

The learning loss expert group that never was

So back to the expert group that was supposed to address this problem - what happened next? The answer, we now know, is a depressingly familiar one - absolutely nothing.

Last week the DfE stated that “in light” of the appointment of Sir Kevan Collins as the government’s education recovery commissioner “we will not be establishing a separate expert group to advise on these issues [assessing and addressing the impact of differential learning loss for students]”.

The department dropped this bombshell on 8 February. So more than two months after it was first promised we finally learned that there will in fact be no group of experts looking at this crucial issue at all.

But what about the work the DfE had been doing “to finalise the terms of reference and membership” of the group? Had that come to anything? Were any members ever appointed? No, Tes, was told last week, there were never any members because the group was never established.

None­­­ of that gives the impression of the DfE taking a serious and urgent issue very seriously. It appears that on one of the trickiest and most damaging problems the pandemic has thrown up the DfE actually spent two whole months - at a crucial time in the school year - sitting on its hands doing absolutely nothing.

Can Sir Kevan Collins save the day?

But could the very capable Sir Kevan come in now and save the day? Well maybe. Except that, guess what - in the recovery commissioner’s job description released by the DfE on Thursday it specifically says that he “will not have a role in relation to… the process of teacher-assessed grades for qualifications in the academic year 2020-21”.

So, for exam year students hit by differential learning loss Sir Kevan will not be able to do anything about the issue they are most worried about anyway - their grades.

Time is running out fast for these GCSE and A-level students. And the DfE, through apparent inertia, has thrown away ten whole weeks when it could have made some progress on this enormous potential injustice.

We haven’t been told why nothing was done and we probably never will be. In truth, following self-inflicted difficulties over everything from school re-openings to free school meal vouchers and delayed laptops it just feels a bit like more of the same from the DfE.

But for the students on the rough end of the pandemic this is their one chance at life and they deserve some kind of explanation. It’s not that there will be any kind of easy solution. It’s the fact that for two crucial months the DfE didn’t even seem to be attempting to find one.